


Alloys and Dust

by dancinbutterfly



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies), X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) - Fandom, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: AU for X-Men: Days of Future Past, All the Xmen are dead, Amputation, Canon Disabled Character, Cars, Charles is dead, Erik lives a very very long life, Gen, M/M, Mad Max Comic Canon, Mechanics, Mutants, Off-screen cannibalism, Post-Apocalypse, War Boys, X-Men: Days of Future Past References
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-03
Updated: 2015-06-03
Packaged: 2018-04-02 16:34:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4066954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dancinbutterfly/pseuds/dancinbutterfly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Erik returns with the revised prosthetic, Furiosa puts it on, picks up a wrench, spins her wrist around, and nods. “Yeah. This will do.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Alloys and Dust

**Author's Note:**

> I literally woke up with this idea and couldnt go back to sleep until I wrote it. I wrote it in one sitting and couldn't stop myself. I had fun. I hope it's okay.

In the new future, the one Logan leaves behind, mutants are everywhere but they are Shaw’s children of the atom, not carriers of the X-gene. They are normal humans twisted by radiation and gasoline and waste. They are half-life, sick and desperate and more closed minded and afraid than before. 

It’s not the sentinel program that causes the end. It’s simple human greed and desperation - fossil fuels and oil rights and nuclear testing and ruined water, things that he cannot stop alone until it is too late. Things the X-men cannot stop until they are among the dead and dying themselves.

As the world burns, the humans too many and too quick for Erick to stop their self-destruction, he travels from continent to continent and thinks “Charles. You were right.” By then Charles is gone and it is to late to tell him so. 

He draws strength from the magnetic energy of the earth itself and it is rejuvenating, protecting. He does not hunt for gasoline - he can fly faster. He hunts for his own kind but without Cerebra finds nothing but the ill and the dying and he grows old.

He ends up in Australia because America, Europe and South America all hold too many failures, too many losses. He lacks the languages for Asia and Africa- before the television and radios went dead, Africa was one of the worst devastated in the wars for mineral rights - entire countries nuked into oblivion for the little rocks that powered technology. He is a weak man and cannot bare to see it. 

Not that Australia has been spared but it took the least of the damage. There is hope there. Or there is when he arrives. Days pass and green things die and with it so does the hope. 

Erik follows the iron in the blood of men, cloaked in rags and finds nightmare after nightmare. Men and women living in canyons, in pits, wandering the desert that seems to span forever. But he is an old man and no one is worried by him. Mostly, they want stories from him. “Tell us of the old world,” the children, what few he meet, ask. “Is it true that there was enough water for everyone? Enough gasoline?”

Erik cries when he weaves tales about his family, the man he lost, the school he built, the world that was destroyed. The childless adults listen too, and in their eyes he can see them taking notes. Erik wonders if they will live long enough to share what he tells them with their children.

They whisper about the old man who knows so much yet does not have the tattoos of a wordburger but no one approaches him, no one accosts him. He has nothing to take and at his age, his flesh is too stringy to be good eating. 

For he is so old. So much older than he ever thought he would live to be, older than a human, older than a warrior should ever live to be. He knows, thanks to a memorable conversation Hank McCoy years before the Oil Wars began, that it's his mutation that is slowing his aging, replenishing the mineral nutrients others lose from the very earth itself. Yet the more despairing eyes he sees, the more he wishes he weren’t. 

“There’s somewhere new,” the whispers start a two or three thousand days after he arrives on the continent. “Water,” they say. “And food. Cars and guzzoline in the wasteland. You just have to get there.”

That’s the trick for them isn’t it. Getting there. “Where is it?” Erik asks. The people in his caravan, heading north, look at him with pity in their eyes. 

“South and west.” They tell him. “Far. You’ll never make it alone.”

He doesn’t bother to argue with them. He just walks into the waste until they have disappeared from sight then shoots into the air. 

What he finds is a beautiful hell. Immortan Joe owns the water Erik could pull from the earth and the food he could send tumbling from the rocks and the people who depend on both. He is a godking atop the Citadel with an army of acolyte warriors who don’t realize how enslaved they are, they’re so deep and peasants who are so desperate they don’t care. The healers use other humans for parts without care for their suffering and the task masters use slave labor to work their machines it is hardly the paradise promised.

But there is water and Erik is a mutant but he is still a living animal. So he stays. He has endured worse, a thought that makes him laugh at odd times and gives him a reputation for being a crazy old man.

“Tough though,” they say. “Tough old scag. Just keeps going and going. Engine on him must be something else.”

They have no idea. 

He tells the guards to the high place that Immortan Joe inhabits that he was a mechanic in the world before which is a lie. He did not become one until the world died and necessity led him to speak to the metal in engines, to bend them to his well, push the sand or dirt or oil from their cores and make them pristine again. 

Only a technopath could be better and he has not seen one in years, has not seen one of his own kind in decades. The only one he ever hopes to see again is Logan because he knows the man survived, even if he didn’t want to. It’s who he is. 

The guards are skeptical but he resurrects a once-dead V-8 in under an hour (It would take him about three minutes but he can’t make it look too easy now can he? He suspects this world is one that believes in and fears magic once again.) they change their tune. They want to put him in charge but he turns them down. “I’m a worker not a leader,” he lies smoothly and thinks _oh Charles, wouldn’t you laugh at that if you were here_.

He meets Furiosa in the engineering crew. She is young, smart and is one of the few female war boys. She is a true warrior in every sense of the word and she lives up to her name. There is a galaxy of anger in her eyes just behind the calm facade she presents. She reminds him of Mystique and for that alone he could love her like a daughter if he thought for a single moment she would let him. She also has only one complete arm, the other ending in a smooth stub.

But she is her own creature. She accomplishes thrice what her male counterparts can with half the limbs. Her frustration is evident and Erik, in a moment of generosity he has not felt in thousands of days, approaches her when she’s shoulder deep in beneath the hood of a battle car. 

“Would you like some help?” he asks her, knowing he will be rejected. That’s all right. He needs to be rejected to make his point.

She does not even pause to look up. “I’m doing great, old man, thanks.”

“I meant, would you like some help building a prosthetic,” he waves a hand at the place where her left arm ends. “I’m quite good with metal.”

She lifts her head and stares at him. “Don’t play games with me, old man. I’ve killed scags older than you for less.”

“Let me throw something together. If you don’t like it, you can use the pieces.”

She nods slowly, eyes narrow. “Why?”

“Because you remind me of someone.”

“Don’t we all.” 

Getting the metal is easy. It liquifies and flows to him from all over the Citadel to his sleeping place, collecting in puddles and piles around him. Getting a skeleton arm is easy as well. 

Bodies don’t last long here in the Citadel. Flesh is consumed and all is left is bones. So its just a matter of being in the right place at the right time to get a left arm. No one stops him, it’s just bones after all. Not like he’s taking meat out of someone’s mouth. At first he tries to recreate the bone itself but that wouldn’t hold so he goes for something different, an arm if a human limb were a machine not bone. He’s never done this before but with the skeletal arm and near identical skeleton hand for reference he thinks he has a decent start. 

“I can’t do fukashima with these fingers,” Furiosa says instead of thank you.

“The rest of it works for you though," he says mentally adjusting the fit of the metal to her arm in tiny increments she hopefully can’t feel. She nods and moves it through the air. It’s bound to her body with leather and pivots well at the shoulder and elbow. The wrist twists well but she’s right the fingers are stiff.

He holds out his hand and she unwraps the bindings and hands the metal limb back to him. His next version has fewer fingers that are thicker and connect better to her arm. When Erik returns with the revised prosthetic, Furiosa puts it on, picks up a wrench, spins her wrist around, and nods. “Yeah. This will do.”

“Good,” Erik says, feeling the metal move and smiles. There is a satisfaction in giving something only he can do, that is in away something of himself. He hasn’t been able to in so long and he knows somehow that this woman will use his creation with all the rage and rebellion he no longer can carry himself. She is strong and he admires her. He is happy to help and somewhere, deep down, the remnants of Charles settle in his heart, happy too.


End file.
